Sunday, March 27, 2005

Backup strategy

After my hard drive failure, I think that I have come up with a backup strategy that I can keep up with. On a regular bases, maybe once a week, I will back up my whole hard drive to an external firewire drive. The external drive, is large enough so I can have a partition for every drive that I want to have backed up. I will use Carbon Copy Cloner to just make a copy of each drive.

Then daily, I will use Apple's Backup to backup my home directory to my iDisk. (This is all of my home directory, except for my Downloads and Movie folder). I don't keep my iPhoto or my iTunes library in my home directory.

There is one problem with this. It appears that Apple's Backup program does not backup hidden files or directories (that start with ".'). If they did, I would want to exclude my .ssh directory.

In this previous post, I said that I was going to cancel my .Mac subscription. I have decided to renew it, because it is the easiest thing to use, and I don't mind paying $150 a year to have online storage space, that I don't have to manage.